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Photographs and text explore how it feels to touch such things as sand, glass, tree bark, and water.

Touching

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Photographs and text explore how it feels to touch such things as sand, glass, tree bark, and water.

Touching

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Recent breakthroughs in neuroscience have revolutionized our understanding of the human mind and human cognition. But what implications do these new findings have for the place of reason–long considered the crowning human faculty that ensured transcendent purpose–in human life? This is the profoundly important question Donald Calne, a leading neurologist and clinician, addresses in Within Reason.

His conclusions are startling, disturbing, and of immense potential usefulness. Offering both a general explanation of the way the mind works and a compelling humanistic defense of the value of science and rationality, Calne shows that reason has no direct links to the brain’s pathways of pleasure and satisfaction that motivate our behavior. Reason is simply a powerful tool put into the service of goals it cannot determine or change. Within Reason brilliantly and succinctly delineates how reason–through its deployment in all domains of human endeavor, from science to religion, from ethics, commerce, and government to art and music–has enabled mankind to achieve dominance over all other forms of life without providing any specifiable content, beyond survival, to the meaning of existence.  Echoing the great religious and philosophical traditions but written from the perspective of neuroscience, Within Reason offers a new and fascinating picture of the role of rationality in both evolution and daily consciousness.Amazon.com Review
Neurology researcher and clinician Donald Calne compares defining reason to assembling an incomplete jigsaw puzzle: we don’t have all the pieces, and the pieces we do have don’t always fit together well. But that doesn’t stop him from setting out on the ambitious task of surveying our current understanding of reason and the historical role it has played for our species.

Within Reason begins with a simple–and in some ways counterintuitive–definition of reason, calling it a mere tool, not a motivator of humanity but an enabler. A powerful and versatile tool to be sure, but one whose purpose is specific to helping us get what we want, not revealing why it is that we want it. With this supposition, Calne methodically dissects reason’s role in such spheres as ethics, government, language, and religion, supporting each assertion with historical anecdotes and the writing and research of others.

If Within Reason is any indication, Donald Calne would be charming dinner company. While you might not agree with every point he makes, you’d never be disappointed by the conversation. –Paul Hughes

Within Reason: Rationality and Human Behavior

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Seemingly simple behaviours turn out, on reflection, to be discouragingly complex. For many years, cognitive operations such as sensation, perception, comparing percepts to stored models (short-term and long-term memory), decision-making and planning of actions were treated by most neuroscientists as separate areas of research. This was not because the neuroscience community believed these operations to act independently—it is intuitive that any common cognitive process seamlessly interweaves these operations—but because too little was known about the individual processes constituting the full behaviour, and experimental paradigms and data collection methods were not sufficiently well developed to put the processes in sequence in any controlled manner. These limitations are now being overcome in the leading cognitive neuroscience laboratories, and this book is a timely summary of the current state of the art.

The theme of the book is how the brain uses sensory information to develop and decide upon the appropriate action, and how the brain determines the appropriate action to optimize the collection of new sensory information. It addresses several key questions. How are percepts built up in the cortex and how are judgments of the percept made? In what way does information flow within and between cortical regions, and what is accomplished by successive (and reverberating) stages of processing? How are decisions made about the percept subsequently acted upon, through their conversion to a response according to the learned criterion for action? How does the predicted or expected sensation interact with the actual incoming flow of sensory signals?  The chapters and discussions in the book reveal how answering these questions requires an understanding of sensory–motor loops: our perception of the world drives new actions, and the actions undertaken at any moment lead to a new ‘view’ of the world.

This book is a fascinating read for all clinical and experimental psychologists  and neuroscientists, as well as anyone interested in how we perceive the world and act within it.

Percept, Decision, Action: Bridging the Gaps

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The medical literature contains volumes of information on disorders of the tendons and nerves. Tendon, Nerve and Other Disorders winnows that data down into a manageable volume, specifically focusing on problems affecting the hand. The text serves as a one-stop reference for practitioners who treat musicians, athletes, and other patients with repetitive motion problems or arthritis. This volume profiles all the most important problems in surgery of the nerves and tendons, in congenital, inflammatory, and occupational disorders of the hand, and those upper extremity disorders affecting the hand.

Nerve Tendon and Other Disorders

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How do people with brain damage communicate? How does the partial or total loss of the ability to speak and use language fluently manifest itself in actual conversation? How are people with brain damage able to expand their cognitive ability through interaction with others – and how do these discursive activities in turn influence cognition?

This groundbreaking collection of new articles examines the ways in which aphasia and other neurological deficits lead to language impairments that shape the production, reception and processing of language. Edited by noted linguistic anthropologist Charles Goodwin and with contributions from a wide range of international scholars, the articles provide a pragmatic and interactive perspective on the types of challenges that face aphasic speakers in any given act of communication.

Conversation and Brain Damage will be invaluable to linguists, discourse analysts, linguistic and medical anthropologists, speech therapists, neurologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, workers in mental health care and in public health, sociologists, and readers interested in the long-term implications of brain damage.

Conversation and Brain Damage

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Microsurgery of the Skull Base

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One of the most dramatic areas of development in early human life is that of vision. Whereas vision plays a relatively minor role in the world of the newborn infant, by six months it has assumed the position as a dominant sense and forms the basis of later perceptual, cognitive, and social development.

From a world leader in the study of visual development in human infants comes a major new book, condensing a lifetime of work in this area. Drawing on over 20 years of cutting edge research in the Visual Development Units in Cambridge and University College, London, this book provides the definitive account of what we know about the developing visual system and the problems that can occur during development. The book reviews, evaluates, and sets in context the exciting progress being made in this area, and additionally suggests new areas for research. Written to be accessible to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers in psychology, the neurosciences, optometry, and visual science, this volume represents an important new addition to the literature on vision.

The Developing Visual Brain

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This special thematic volume on Autism in the International Review of Research in Mental Retardation series provides a comprehensive overview of research on autism today. Coverage includes discussion of the genetics, diagnosis, neural and cognitive basis, and development of autism, as well as an exploration of the effects of autism on language, attachment, and emotional responsiveness. A final chapter examines the psychological impact that raising an autistic child has on the family.

International Review of Research in Mental Retardation, Volume 23: Austism

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The thoroughly revised, updated Third Edition of this highly acclaimed work presents the most recent advances in the diagnosis and treatment of cervical spine disorders. Prepared by internationally recognized members of The Cervical Spine Research Society Editorial Committee, this volume is the definitive source of information on basic and clinical research, new diagnostic techniques, and current therapeutic strategies. The book is profusely illustrated with 1,000 photographs, line drawings, and radiographs, 850 of which are new to this edition. Coverage features expert discussions of surgical indications and techniques for specific diseases, including the use of internal fixation where appropriate. Detailed information is provided on state-of-the-art diagnostic imaging modalities such as magnetic resonance imaging. This edition also features a chapter on principles of intraoperative monitoring and an in-depth discussion of acute spinal cord injuries, including pathophysiologic mechanisms, experimental therapy, and recovery of function.

The Cervical Spine: The Cervical Spine Research Society Editorial Committee